An Egyptian blog, Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket, has won a special prize at the Deutsche Welle Best of Blogs 2005. In light of current events in China and Tunisia, the BOBs international jury members unanimously decided to announce the winner of the Special Reporters sans Frontières Award a week early to draw attention to weblogs that work to promote freedom of expression, often under the most oppressive conditions.
The wife-husband pair, who run Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket (http://www.manalaa.net), has become an institution among Arabic bloggers and journalists critical of the Egyptian regime. Manal and Alaa strive to promote freedom of expression and protect human rights as well as highlight the need for political reforms in Egypt, an RSF release said. Their weblog also offers other bloggers free storage space and practical help starting their own initiatives and has been has been crucial is developing a critical and engaged blogger scene in Egypt and the Arabic-speaking world.
According to RSF, Manal and Alaa are a landmark in the Egyptian political and blogging movement. They support free speech, advocate human rights and political reform in their blog, they offer linux training, free hosting and open source programming, but they also gather all Egyptian blog posts in an aggregator that has been the place to go to know what is going on in Egypt. All opinions are welcomed and bloggers from all parts of the political spectrum are there. In their blog, one can see demonstrations in action and one can follow the hottest political discussions.
The 12-member jury of the BOB Awards unanimously condemned the blocking of "Wang Yi’s Microphone" (http://zhivago.tianyablog.com) and called on Chinese authorities to end their censorship of blogs and the Internet. Failure to declare their protest in light of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) from November 16 to November 18 in Tunis, at which a Chinese delegation is expected, would be tantamount to tolerating censorship, the jury members stated.
Wang Yi’s weblog was among the final three candidates for the Special Award from RSF. Also among the top three nominees were a blog written by Tunisian judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui (http://yahyaoui.blogspot.com and the Egyptian blog "Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket," which went on to win the award.
On October 24, 2005, the Deutsche Welle announced the nominees in its annual BOBs – the Best of the Blogs Awards. Shortly after the candidates were announced, access to "Wang Yi’s Microphone," which was nominated in the RSF and Best Weblog categories, was blocked by local Chinese authorities in Hai-Nan province.
A lawyer by profession, Wang Yi regularly used his blog to criticise the government. His courageous efforts to promote freedom of expression and an independent judiciary system in China were among the reasons why he was nominated in this year’s awards. "Bloggers like Wang Yi, who are courageous enough to publicly protest against government bans, deserve the support of the international community," emphasised Guido Baumhauer, Editor in Chief of dw-world.de, the Deutsche Welle’s online presence.
"This action really shows that the Chinese government has no respect for freedom of expression," underlined Julien Pain, a member of the BOBs jury and head of the RSF Internet Freedom Desk. "The Chinese government started censoring the Internet a long time ago, it is not the first time that a blog has been shut down, but it shows again that each time a new form of circulating information is created, the Chinese authorities manage to control it and shut it down – and that’s scary."
Chinese jury member Zhao Jing, who is better known as Michael Anti, said he finds the Chinese authorities’ decision to be a grave mistake. "Blogs play an important role in freedom of speech, and the fact that the Chinese government is censoring them proves how far China is from accepting free speech," he said.
The 12 Best of the Blogs jury members are: Hossein 'Hoder' Derakhshan (Iran), Lisa Stone (USA), Ammar Abdulhamid (Syria), Loïc le Meur (France), Yegor Bykovsky (Russia), Michael Anti (China), André Lemos (Brazil), Jose Luis Orihuela and Ignacio Escolar (Spain), Konstantin Klein and J�rg Kantel (Germany), Julien Pain (France, Reporters Without Borders).
The media and cooperation partners are Reporters sans Frontières, CBC.ca (Canada), Handelsblatt.com (Germany), LeMonde.fr (France), Clarín.com (Argentina), Folha Online (Brazil), Shargh Newspaper (Iran), Lenta.ru (Russia), Iran-Emrooz.net (Iran), and Phoenix TV (China).
